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29 L. & Critique 1 (2018)

handle is hein.journals/lwcrtq29 and id is 1 raw text is: Law Critique (2018) 29:1-29 CrssMark https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-017-9197-4 Mother India: The Role of the Maternal Figure in Establishing Legal Subjectivity Kanika Sharma1,2 Published online: 8 April 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017 Abstract Psychoanalytic jurisprudence attempts to understand the images used by law to attract and capture the subject. In keeping with the larger psychoanalytic tradition, such theories tend to overemphasise the paternal principle. The image of law is said to be the image of the paterfamilias-the biological father, the sovereign, or God. In contrast to such theories, I would like to introduce the image of the mother and analyse its impact on the subject's relation to law. For this purpose, I examine the history and use of the figure of Bharat Mata or Mother India and how it influences the Indian subject's relation to law. When the subject is torn between his loyalties to the lawmaker-as-father and the nation-as-mother, who does he side with? Eschewing Greek myths and the Oedipus complex, I focus instead on Hindu mythology and the notion of an oedipal alliance to understand legal subjectivity in India. Lastly, I analyse a defining Indian political trial, the Gandhi murder trial, in which all these notions come to play and the accused justifies his decision to murder the father of the nation in the name of the motherland. Keywords Bharat Mata - Gandhi murder trial - Godse - Legal subjectivity - Oedipal alliance - Psychoanalytic jurisprudence It would have been impossible to explore the figure of Mother India without taking recourse to her visual representations. I must thank Priya Paul, Urvashi Butalia and Sherna Dastur for the permission to use images from their collections; as well as Sumathi Ramaswamy who has lent me an image, her time and valuable guidance. ® Kanika Sharma k.sharma@bbk.ac.uk; ks72@soas.ac.uk Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK 2 SOAS, University of London, London, UK I_ Springer